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Mecanoo unwraps Birmingham City Library

Birmingham City Library by Meccanoo. Photography by Christian Richters

Dutch practice Mecanoo’s £193 million Birmingham City Library opens to the public next week (3 September).

The controversial building stands in Centenary Square, between Baskerville House (above right) and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (REP, above left) on the site of a former car park. The nine-storey landmark will replace John Madin’s soon-to-be-demolished Brutalist 1970s building as the city’s central library.

Clad with a skin of overlapping aluminium rings ‘inspired by the artisan tradition of this once industrial city’, the facade was criticised by CABE for ‘not having evolved beyond an initial abstract idea’ and for failing to have a major practical function (AJ 08.10.09).

Internally the 35,000m² library is arranged around a circular atrium that changes in size as it rises through the building.

A ‘golden box’ of secure archive storage, which contains the city’s collection of archives, photography and rare books, occupies two upper levels of the building, with the Shakespeare Memorial Room, a Victorian reading room lined with wood from the first Birmingham Central Library at the top of the building. Two roof gardens allow visitors to look down into the square, where an amphitheatre acts as a performance space. A new flexible studio theatre is shared with the recently refurbished 1971 REP building next door.

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The Architects' Journal is the voice of architecture in Britain. We sit at the heart of the debate about British architecture and British cities, and form opinions across the whole construction industry on design-related matters